


Steaming

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: The Authority
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-08
Updated: 2011-08-08
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:42:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jenny spies on people.  The tech makes it so easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steaming

Inspiration, in its many forms, came from Apollo and Midnighter.    
She got the idea of installing a bathtub from them.  Not  
directly, of course.  Even Apollo at his chattiest wouldn't have  
mentioned it to her, and Midnighter's reserve

//shyness//

left no room in casual conversation for his love for Apollo or  
any of the things they did together.  If you didn't know them,  
she supposed, it was possible that you wouldn't realize.  Until  
they trusted you a little.  Until the first time Apollo brushed a  
quick kiss across Midnighter's half-concealed mouth and grinned at  
you while he walked out.  Cheeky bastard.

In fact, it came about because she was . . . well, Shen would  
probably have called it spying, but Shen completely failed to  
have a sense of humour about things like that.  Moral little cow.  

In her quarters, with her feet up and half a glass of gin cradled  
in her lap, letting the Carrier flash her images of the known  
universe, including their version of earth and the interior of  
their dimension-shifting home.  For comfort or entertainment or  
something.  Because she was Jennifer Sparks and she could.  The  
psychedelic higher planes were the most beautiful things she'd  
seen since she abandoned acid in favour of her longer-standing  
and more comforting alcoholism.  

Birds that rose up the Carrier's hull singing purple arias.    
Oceans of bitter-sharp smell that was almost, but not quite,  
blue.  Symphonic geographies.

Synesthesia was definitely the order of the night.

Then inside.  Angie curled up in her computer chair in panties  
and a Cornell U t-shirt, one currently flesh-toned knee tucked up  
under her chin.  A mass of braids swung forward against her face,  
and her fingers twitched in a nic-craving gesture that Jenny  
recognized all too well.  No Jack, but he might have been out for  
the night.  

Flick.

Shen reading.  No wings, saffron-coloured sari wrapped  
comfortably around her.  Flick of an eyebrow as if she knew Jenny  
was watching.  Mystically beautiful, really, even with the short-  
cut hair.  Fantastic lips that still brushed the back of Jenny's  
neck occasionally, when they needed to.  Too

//fucking serene//

still for Jenny's taste.  As if she could create peace on earth  
by radiating it from herself.  Probably that was why they weren't  
lovers anymore, except in the most occasional sense.

Flick.  Outside.  Earth.  Jack in London, walking barefoot in  
Leicester Square.  A place-name that wouldn't have made her laugh  
forty years ago, when it was just another sector of home.  But  
sometime around nineteen seventy, when she'd been barefoot and  
windblown and bead-wearing and happily stoned, she'd picked up  
some scruffy lad from Dartmouth and they'd spent a vastly  
entertaining night on a roof in King's Cross, writing what she  
suspected remained the most obscene song of the twentieth  
century, and for a laugh they'd set most of its events in  
Leicester.  Seeing it now still made her think of livestock.    
Sometime towards morning, her boy had put that spectacular mouth  
to rather better use, and she'd decided that his fame wasn't  
entirely undeserved.

Damn.  It'd been a long time since she'd had a shag that good.    
Not quite as long ago as Dartmouth-boy, but a long time.

Flick.  Pacific ocean.  Fractal pods of baleen whales just under  
the surface, whistling.

Flick.  Tiananmen.  Flick.  Golden Gate Park.  Flick.  The  
Brandenburg Gate.  Flick.  Absolutely the best lesbian bar in  
Austin, Texas.  Flick.  Luminous trickster flowers, expanding at  
the rate of dreams.  Flick.

Apollo, with his head back on the bathtub rim and the  
Midnighter's head pillowed in the hollow of his shoulder.  The  
sight was strange for the unguardedness of the moment, and  
stranger for the nakedness of Midnighter's face.  There were  
startling cheekbones under that graph of scars, and very long  
lashes brushed them.  One edge of his mouth was still curled in a  
half-sneer, but without the mask to interfere, she could see that  
the expression was permanent and unintentional, hinging on a  
particularly nasty scar that pulled his lip upwards.

She wondered who'd constructed the bathroom like that.  Neither  
of them could talk to the Carrier directly.  They -- or more  
likely Apollo -- would have had to ask Angie or the Doctor to  
persuade the Carrier to make the necessary alterations to her  
form.  A lot of details, though perhaps the Carrier had provided  
those herself.  Light edged in through some kind of screen.  The  
tub itself was deep, for one thing, and wide enough for two truly  
ripped blokes to soak in together.  What Jenny would have  
designed herself, if she'd thought of it.

It looked warm.  Steam floated all through the room, and it was  
still rising off the water.  Apollo swept up a double handful of  
water and poured it over Midnighter's short-cut hair, laughed as  
the other man arched back into him.  Bent and kissed him.

She watched them wrestle for a minute, twisting against each  
other until they settled into their newly chosen arrangement of  
limbs.  Knees up, Apollo's legs outside Midnighter's.  Classic  
bathtub, really.  Midnighter was close to dozing, she thought.    
And bugger her if his face wasn't relaxing into the sweetest look  
she'd seen in years.  Not bad for a man that Angie's once  
described as the scariest parts of Batman and Deliverance in one  
body.

Apollo swept up palmfuls of water every minute or so and let them  
sweep down on his partner.  Still steaming.  It occurred to Jenny  
finally that he must be using his own solar energy to heat the  
water.  For Midnighter, who was always cold.

Blue obsession reflected in the water.  Flick.

More gin.  Two or three swallows was all that was left in the  
glass, and in the time it took her to get up and retrieve the  
bottle, the Carrier wall had shifted to an extended Cairo  
skyline, brilliant with all the colours of pollution.

***

She caught them at other times, sometimes just curled together  
and drifting in the not-sleep state that they tended towards at  
rest.  Touching down the length of their bodies.  Other times  
moving around their quarters.  Which was how she learned how  
rarely even Apollo got to see the Midnighter naked.  As soon as  
Apollo was out of arms' reach, the leather armour was back around  
him.  She'd seen Apollo kneel in front of him, unbelievably  
graceful for a man dressed in jeans and an unbuttoned Oxford, and  
peel one glove away, kiss each finger and then replace it.

She only watched them

//make love//

shag once.  Genuinely unpornographic, if only because the  
constant lip-lock shielded the details of their bodies from her.    
Midnighter on top, Apollo with his knees hooked around  
Midnighter's hips

//nobody's body should bend like that//

to hold him down.  Both of them snogging, hot and wet and messy  
and loud.  Twisting and fucking but obviously more absorbed in  
the kisses.

Jenny couldn't remember the last time she'd kissed like that.    
She decided to be jealous.  Hissed and threw a pillow at the wall  
screen, then had to persuade the Carrier to restore the image.  
Three husbands, several dozen lovers, and a couple of hundred  
semi-anonymous shags, and she was buggered if she could remember  
even one kiss that good.

The two of them were still locked together, only tilting their  
heads occasionally to change the angle.  One big scarred hand  
tangled briefly in Apollo's hair, then smoothed down to tease at  
the edges of his face.

Twist of Midnighter's hips and she could feel Apollo's hiss cut  
through the darkened air.  Only a crack in the seal of their  
mouths before Midnighter caught him again, kissed and fucked him  
both at once.  

Sodding beautiful.

Somewhere behind her, "Jenny?"  That accent so thick it sounded  
like it was coming through water or smoke.

"C'min, Doctor."  Didn't move her eyes from the screen.

The Doctor padded in and stopped just behind her, hovering like a  
cracked moth.  Watched her, washed-out eyes catching riffs of  
experience beyond all of her senses.

She held out an arm, finally, and he came gratefully.  Settled  
beside her and laid down, pressing his face between her breast  
and shoulder.  He breathed into her shirt, relaxed for a moment,  
then started to shake.  She didn't comment on the new sogginess  
on her blouse that had to mean he was crying.

Passion snow outside.  White shimmer of fire.  Drift of smoke and  
magic off the Doctor.  Apollo and Midnighter, still kissing.

On a different night, the Doctor had spent nearly an hour  
stroking her scalp, tracing the destroyed places that his first  
miracle had reassembled.  He'd watched her through huge eyes,  
then apparently decided that she wasn't going to hurt him.  Took  
his glasses off and set them aside, pressed his lips once,  
gently, to her temple.  Then curled himself up in her lap and  
gone to sleep.

She rocked him now a little, and quietly cursed a universe that  
had turned an already damaged boy into a magician.  He would be  
\-- what, now? twenty-three?  Too young.  In some other universe,  
there had to be a version of him

//happily//

curled up with his Playstation and cigarettes, completely  
unresponsible for the world's continued existence.  Where Jenny  
Sparks didn't need to seethe jealousy at the only two people in  
the world still in love, or to cradle a sobbing redhead in her  
lap while outside the liquid parts of eros cracked open and began  
steaming.


End file.
